With the rapid pace of the tablet market showing no signs of slowing, Asus CEO Jonney Shih pulled out the Transformer successor, apparently called the Transformer Prime, while on stage at the AsiaD Conference in Hong Kong today. The 8.3 mm thin tablet will be formally announced on November 9th, said Shih, and would feature NVIDIA's Kal-El quad-core SoC. The device has a 10" form factor like the original and while he did not specify whether it would be launching with Ice Cream Sandwich, he did say that we could expect Ice Cream Sandwich to show up in tablets before the end of the year. The tablet itself has USB and mini-HDMI ports, along with an SD card reader and a reported 14.5 hour battery. The new keyboard dock looks to aim for an even thinner duo than the original Transformer, and with those four (five) cores purring it should be a screamer.

As if that weren't enough, Shih also teased an update on the Padfone, the tablet/phone pair first showed off in May at Computex. According to Shih, the device still has to undergo carrier testing and that they're targeting a Q1 2012 release, and it will be running Ice Cream Sandwich. As the Padfone must serve as a competent, and battery sparing, phone, in addition to its tablet duties, it may be running on Tegra 2 and not Kal-El. We'll know for sure next Spring, for now enjoy a teaser video below.

I wouldn't hold my breath. A powered USB device could draw as much power continiously as the tablet does under load, raping the battery in the process. In addtion to having to add significantly stronger power circuitry a vendor would run the risk of being slammed in the press/by consumers when thier battery life implodes while playing music of an external magnetic hard drive.Reply

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Unless this means being able to run real PC applications, such as Photo and Video editing, Word processing, etc, well then I welcome this product.

As an owner of the Atrix, I know for a fact that dual-core was mostly a gimmick. I sure hope the same doesn't apply to the quad cores. Give me the aforementioned apps, and you'll have my money. Otherwise I'll just wait for the Windows 8 Transformer.Reply

Unless this means being able to run real PC applications, such as Photo and Video editing, Word processing, etc, well then I welcome this product.

As an owner of the Atrix, I know for a fact that dual-core was mostly a gimmick. I sure hope the same doesn't apply to the quad cores. Give me the aforementioned apps, and you'll have my money. Otherwise I'll just wait for the Windows 8 Transformer.Reply

I certainly look forward to seeing the 28nm heterogeneous SoCs duke it out in the coming months and share many of the concerns regarding in particular krait vs kal-el, but my biggest question of all is who is going to stop the mod community from preparing android roms for win8 tablets and vice versa? There will be a handful of multiplatform SoCs in the market so I imagine it is not a question of drivers nor of storage capacity. Reply